Operation Rod of Iron: AU fic

[TimM]

The remainder of the story will be shorts like this, except for the last chapter which will be a little longer.

Thanks for the update.

[Nictionary]

January 12, 1929

Grigory Nikulin, now working as head of the Moscow State Insurance Company, had mourned long and deeply for his “father,” Yurovsky.  Now, two and half years later, he was about to meet a similar fate.  This morning, he was sitting in his car parked in Kozhevnicheskaya Ulitsa outside his apartment in the southeast part of the city, getting ready to drive to his office.  As he was starting the car, a car approached containing three men and drew up alongside Nikulin’s vehicle.  One of the men threw a bomb through an open window.  Nikulin died instantly but no one else was hurt.  None of the men in the other car were ever traced.

[Nictionary]

February 10, 1930

Georgy Safarov had been expelled from the party in 1927, but in late 1928 he had been readmitted to the party and at the beginning of 1930 he was restored to his old post as head of the Eastern Department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.  His tenure there, however, would last barely three weeks.  On this day, he was driving to his office, accompanied by his comrade Grigory Yurievich Shagidzyanov, who sat next to him in the front passenger seat, and his three children, aged 4, 9 and 13.  As the car waited at a traffic junction, two burly young men on a motorcycle, their faces covered by crash helmets, pulled up alongside it and shot and killed Safarov with pistols fitted with silencers.  They also injured Shagidzyanov and Safarov’s three children.

[TimM]

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

[Nictionary]

November 30, 1932

   The execution of the Romanov family had only marked the start of Filipp Goloshchyokin’s participation in mass murder.  As First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, he had run Kazakhstan as a local dictator.  His implementation of collectivization there had brought about a deadly famine which killed 2 million people, 38% of the Kazakh population, making them a minority in their own land.  This had led to his being dismissed from office and recalled to Moscow on September 17, 1932.
   The Intelligence Service monitored details of his life and residence and tracked him down.  On November 30, 1932, Intelligence Service gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire on him at the door of the  Hotel National.  Four bullets hit him in the forehead, killing him.  The assassins escaped and were never apprehended.

[JamesAPrattIII]

I must point out there were very few motor vehicles of any sort made in Russia between 1917 and 1932 when GAZ started production. Also the Cheka did a good job post Russian Civil war infiltrating White exile groups.

In flipping through a bio of Trotsky the apartment he lived in in NYC was the first home he had that had a telephone in it. It also had a fairly new device called a refrigerator. The book mentions the rent being $18 a month. I think that was a good months pay back then. I have also read he had a chauffer driven car to drive him around. The book "Wall street and the Bolshevik revolution" wonders where Trotsky got all this money to live so well.

When you consider how many Russians got jailed and deported after Voikov and Kirov were assassinated it would have been blood bath time in the USSR if all these people were killed.

[TimM]

That's the good thing about AU stories.  You're not bound by history.

[JamesAPrattIII]

The book "Memoirs of a Survivor" by Sergei Golitsyn is about life in the between the world wars USSR

[JamesAPrattIII]

There is a movie coming out Operation Finale on the Mossad kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. trailers are on youtube

In Admiral Kolchak's wiki bio I just stumbled on the book "The White Armies of Russia" which is online.

[Nictionary]

April 10, 1933

   Goloshchyokin was too important an individual for his death to go unavenged, and it was followed by a wave of jailings and deportations.  In the meantime, worried by OGPU penetration of ROVS, the Intelligence Service transferred its headquarters to Manchukuo, which was thought to be more secure.  In Manchukuo, the ROVS organization was known as Dal’nevostochnyi Soyuz Voennykh(DNSV, the Far Eastern Union of Servicemen), and counted at least 4,000 members forming a naval department, military youth group and societies of young officers, cadets and alumni of the Irkutsk, Alekseyev, Orenburg and other military academies.
   The assassins now focused their attention on Aleksandr Beloborodov, who had followed the same path of expulsion, repentance and rehabilitation as his old comrade Safarov.  He was currently employed in the system of the Committee of State Purchases in Rostov-na-Donu.  Beloborodov had been the object of a number of Intelligence Service targeted killing attempts before April 10, 1933, when he parked his car in the west of the city, giving “Rodion” enough time to do his job.  Rodion, an assassin with a predilection for explosive devices, slid his burly body underneath the car and attached one of his “Rodion-Ears,” a lethal bomb of his own design.  Rodion had already moved a safe distance away by the time Beloborodov entered the car.  At 0150 hours, as the car drove towards Kruglaya Ploshchad’, its movement jerked the Rodion-Ear’s tilt fuse, causing the supply of mercury to flow to the top of the tube and close the circuit.  Beloborodov’s body was burned beyond recognition.  According to the OGPU, witnesses saw three people following in another car fled on foot after the blast.

[JamesAPrattIII]

I just stumbled upon some old notes I made from the book "The Civil War in South Russia 1918"  It seems there were some White agents in early 1918 wanted to blow up the Smolny then being used as Bolshevik headquarters. General Kornilov I believe was in favor of it but General Alekseev vetoed the plan. If this plan had succeeded and Lenin was killed there was no one at this time who could have taken over from him as Bolshevik leader. A number of the key decisions Lenin made were opposed by most or all the other Bolshevik leaders. No Lenin no Communism ect.

[TimM]

Another excellent source of research.

Sometimes research is necessary, even for an AU story.

[Nictionary]

August 3, 1934

   At the age of forty-nine, Pyotr Yermakov, employed since 1927 as inspector of prisons for the Urals, was drawing his pension.  Always anxious to boost his role not just in the Romanovs’ murders but in the Revolution itself, he continually toured schools and Young Pioneer camps around Sverdlovsk, as Yekaterinburg was now renamed, lecturing children about his “heroic” deed.
   General Yevgeny Miller, chairman of ROVS, was asked to approve the execution of Yermakov.  Once the execution was approved, Intelligence Service agents began planning the act.
   Yermakov was located in Sverdlovsk.  The operation involved professional lookouts, in a nearby apartment rented much earlier, and a minute study of Yermakov’s daily routine. The Intelligence Service’s agents, led by Rodion, planted another of his bombs under the driver’s seat of Yermakov’s red Ford Model A, filled with just enough explosive to kill all the passengers while avoiding harming others. 
   On August 3, 1934, Yermakov called home to tell his wife to expect guests for Sunday luncheon.  He had met up with two comrades, Nikolai Pospelov and Aleksandr Bozhenov, both of whom had been present at the Romanovs’ burial, and invited them home for a meal.  As they got into their car, “Rex,” chief of the Intelligence Service division responsible for assassinations, and Rodion were sitting in another car, watching them, after many tense hours of surveillance, during which the local militsiya almost caught the Whites.
   Yermakov’s wife was standing on her balcony watching as her husband steered the car up a concrete ramp in front of their apartment building.  As the car reached a retaining wall on one side of the driveway and an open field on the other, the mercury in the tilt fuse under Yermakov’s seat finished flowing to the top of the tube and closed the circuit, which had been activated by a timing device.  In a plume of black smoke, the car's roof disintegrated and the doors burst open.  By the time the ambulance arrived 45 minutes later, Yermakov and his two companions were dead.  His buttocks and part of his back had been blown away by the powerful bomb, which had set the car ablaze.

[TimM]

A bomb.  A nasty way to go.

[JamesAPrattIII]

I think Yermakov would have been driving a GAZ Model A which started production in 1932. This was a copy of the Ford model A.

The book "Hitler's Spies" mentions the German Military attaché to the USSR 1935-41 General Ernst Kostring had a oversized touring car with a 60 gallon fuel tank to go from one counsulate to another. Even if he could not buy gas on the way. No doubt he carried along some extra fuel in some 5 gallon "jerrycans" on these trips.